The processing of a silver halide color photographic material primarily comprises two steps of color development processing and desilvering processing, and the desilvering processing comprises a bleaching step and a fixing step, or a monobath bleach-fixing step which is used in combination with these steps or used alone. Additional steps, that is, water washing, stop processing, stabilization processing, pretreatment for development acceleration and the like are employed, if necessary.
Reduction of the amount of waste solutions of photographic processing solutions has been strongly desired in recent years with the progress of the speedup of the processing for purposes of reduction of environmental pollution, saving resources, and reduction of the production cost. However, reductions of the replenisher and waste solution have not been practiced yet.
Reduction of the replenishers, in particular, reduction of a bleach-fixing solution replenisher causes a problem of coloring of the white portions after processing of the photographic material. This is presumably because the mixing rate of a color developing solution increases and the salt concentration of the bleach-fixing solution increases, and washing out of the water-soluble components contained in the photographic material is deteriorated. This problem is especially conspicuous when the washing or rinsing step after the bleach-fixing step is conducted in a water saving step, and techniques for solving this problem have been desired.
On the other hand, JP-A-49-40943 (the term "JP-A" as used herein means a "published unexamined Japanese patent application) discloses the use of an imidazole compound in a bleach-fixing solution for improving desilvering property.
However, this patent application does not refer to the realization of extremely low replenishment of late years, therefore, the improvement of pure whiteness of the photographic material after processing cannot be expected particularly in a method in which usually the salt concentration becomes high.